Last year, WordCamp London had dedicatory stickers printed along with a Wapuunk-embroidered scarf for attendees. Presently, almost every WordCamp association group started planning their own particular custom wapuu mascots. WordCamp London 2016 will happen this weekend held at London Metropolitan University. The official wapuu of the event will be printed on stickers and might be consolidated into other vintage London -inspired WordCamp swag. Wapuu collectors must arrive early at the event’s venue this weekend, as a limited edition R2-Wapuu has also been designed in appreciation for the WordCamp. Gemma Garner and Scott Evans, UK-based fashioners, teamed up on the R2-D2-inspired wapuu and printed a small batch of 100 stickers. Roughly 600 individuals are expected to attend this year’s event, therefore only few lucky who chase donw Garner or Evans will get a R2-wapuu sticker.

WordCamp London 2016 will kick off in less than 48-hours. There are only 45 slots remaining so hurry and grab your tickets as soon as possible. For further information, kindly visit at WPTavern.

Ottawa, Ontario-based Shopify, is making it easier to use the oh-so-popular WordPress platform for e-commerce. The new Shopify Ecommerce Plugin for WordPress, was introduced by Daniel Patricio, Product Manager of Shopify. These allow owners of WordPress-powered websites to add a shopping function with all the features and security that comes with Shopify. It is free to download and adds a add product button to the CMS platform. Shopify Ecommerce Plugin is versatile plugin that can be used with any WordPress theme.

WordPress Beta 4 of Version 4.5 Released

WordPress Beta 4 of Version 4.5 was released yesterday and a bit closer to a final released. Some features includes responsive sites and add improves the articles composing. The final version release will be on April 12.

Hippo as one of the sponsors of the Intelligent Content Conference

This month, Hippo was one of the sponsors of the Intelligent Content Conference held at Las Vegas. They will be also sponsoring the Moedertaal:Digitaal on March 31 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Content-Commerce Summit on June 1 to 3 in Leipzig, Germany.

WordCamp Europe 2016 will be held on June 24-26 at Vienna, Austria and has expanded its capacity to 2200 attendees. There were 400 additional tickets available last week. This event will be going to be the largest WordPress conference to date. The first 1700 seats were sold out six months in advance which cause the organizers to expand the venue capacity in order to meet the demand for more tickets. There are three additional halls secured by them, it is all walking distance to each other. At the same time, WordCamp Europe will also be hosting the largest WordPress contributor day which will consist around 500 attendees and will be held in one of Vienna’s universities. Current attendees are composing 68 different countries and the organizing team is now from 10 countries both Eastern and Western Europe.

A plugin for Facebook’s Instant Article was released yesterday by the WordPress.com VIP team and will be open to any publisher starting April 12, 2016. Instant Article for WordPress is now available on GitHub and will be available soon to the WordPress plugin directory. Publishers must perform review process in order to ensure that their posts are properly formatted and articles will load instantly on mobile devices once approved. As Facebook stated, the speed is 10 times faster than the standard mobile web. Instant Articles plugin does not have built-in options for serving ads and further customization will left up to the publishers. Instant Articles is not yet available to WordPress.com users but they will explore something in the future.

WooCommerce announced on Twitter last week that its Stripe payment gateway is now a free product. Before the announcement, it was priced at $79 for a single license, $99 for five sites and $199 for 25 sites. The news occurs simultaneously with the debut of Stripe’s new Atlas product. Atlas was created to offer entrepreneurs some assistance to start businesses no matter where they are. When Stripe payment gateway was made available for free, Automattic had a similar objective of lowering the barrier to entry for WooCommerce. Atlas should serve to convey Stripe availability to more areas around the world.